Category: Saving the Planet

A San Mateo-based company is bringing greens to the desert using hydroponic farming.

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Growing greens without using soil is all the rage. Photo via Flickr.

San Mateo-based Crop One Holding is bringing the best of the Salinas Valley (otherwise known as America’s salad bowl) to Dubai thanks to a new deal between the farming company and Emirates Airlines. Crop One will build a 50-foot high sealed warehouse next to the Emirates runway where it will produce 3 tons of leafy vegetables per day for the airline to use for onboard meals.

Crop One grows its greens hydroponically which means it doesn’t use soil. Instead, it nourishes the plants with a nutrient-rich water and LED lights. For more on this cool technology you can check out this story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

If you see a flotilla of unmanned orange vessels making their way toward San Diego, don’t be alarmed. They’re here to help.

The autonomous sailing vehicles, made by Alameda, California-based tech company Saildrone in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are sailing from Canada on a mission to collect information about fish populations. Each Saildrone has 18 sensors that collect data about the ocean below it: wind speed and direction, temperature, salinity, etc.

“Saildrones are 20-feet long and 19-feet off the water,” said Richard Jenkins, CEO of Saildrone, Inc. “Weigh about 60 pounds and can operate kind of indefinitely. Wind propulsion pushes it along, solar charges the batteries and computer for communication.”

Right now, California has too much of a good thing when it comes to solar power.

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Almost every day California is breaking records around how much solar power the state is generating. One one day in March, the state generated enough power to account for 50% of electricity needs.

That should be good news but it’s actually proving to be a problem. Because all solar energy is generated during the day, the state is actually producing more solar power than it can use before the sun goes down, so it’s being forced to pay some other states to take that excess energy off of California’s hands or risk disturbing the delicate balance of supply and demand that keeps the electricity grid in working order.

The solution to this problem is giant batteries that can store energy during the day and release it at night. But so far, battery technology is not up to the challenge. Check out this podcast from Planet Money to learn more about how new kinds of batteries could eventually help California continue to generate lots of solar power.

Three of California’s largest utilities, including Southern California Edison, have put together proposals totaling more than $1 billion to try to electrify the state’s transportation sector.

The costs of the requests by Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and SDG&E will be passed on to ratepayers and still need to be approved by the California Public Utilities Commission. The utilities say the projects will go a long way to reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

With the clock ticking down to the end of this year’s legislative session, our leaders in Sacramento are debating initiatives that will put more clean cars on the road, boost air quality and innovation, and improve the health of our residents. We must take advantage of this brief window of opportunity to recalibrate the state’s primary mechanism for encouraging electric vehicle adoption – the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) credit system.